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One of the inescapable facts of free software is that it involves a lot of law - far more than innocent hackers might expect when they settle down for a light bit of coding.

[…] The problem is that even a tiny licence fee, if levied on a per-copy basis, is impossible for free software because of the way it is distributed. There is simply no way to know how many copies may be shared, and hence no way to collect all those eminently reasonable and non-discriminatory licence fees.

So much quarreling about open standards. Jason Matusow advocates for a document format with RAND licensing conditions for the patents. What does he mean when he talks about RAND? RAND stands for "reasonable and non-discriminatory". But Jason Matusow's company Microsoft lacks honesty when it talks about "reasonable and non-discriminatory" conditions.

In this edition we discuss the misleading term "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms" (FRAND), we explain what we are doing about centralised computer systems and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), and update you on our current campaign to end non-free software commercials by public institutions.

"The Gnu General Public Licence (GPL) has been around in one form or another since the Gnu manifesto published by Richard Stallman in 1985. The free software movement founded at that time has not simply created the most successful copyright licence ever, it has acted as a guide to other, similar movements..."

For the past 26 weeks I've been producing the Bizarre Cathedral strips for Free Software Magazine. Every one of them is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commerical-Share Alike (BY-NC-SA) licence. Recently I've received a few pieces of mail saying this is a'non-free' licence and questioning my use of it here.

One of the striking aspects of the free software community is its obsession with licences. It's as if within every hacker there's a lawyer struggling to get out. But maybe it's not so surprising; as Larry Lessig reminded us, “code is law”, and the reverse is also true in the sense that the licence adopted has a big impact on how the software is produced.

"I have always said that open source software developers must be able to take advantage of [the 2004 ruling]: now they can," the Commission's competition commissioner Neelie Kroes boasted in a press release.

The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSS L. Rev.) is a collaborative legal publication aiming to increase knowledge and understanding among lawyers about Free and Open Source Software issues. Topics covered include copyright, licence implementation, licence interpretation, software patents, open standards, case law and statutory changes.